A Mother’s Day reflection examining marriage, gendered labour, loneliness, and the inherited architecture of emotional expectations. Most marriages do not begin in clarity, but in fear, fear of loneliness, social judgment, and inner incompleteness. Two people come together not to understand themselves, but to manage each other’s emptiness through roles, routines, and silent expectations. The arrangement may work for decades, yet beneath the stability survives an unexamined loneliness that no ritual or relationship can truly dissolve.
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Originally published in The Sunday Guardian on 10 may '26
The institution of marriage is, among other things, one of the most elaborate structures humanity has built to contain human loneliness and give it social form. It provides a framework within which the incompleteness of two people can be distributed, managed, and made largely invisible.
The loneliness that drove each of them toward the other is not resolved inside the marriage; it is submerged, and what submerges it is not intimacy but function, the daily business of a shared life, which keeps both parties occupied enough that the original incompleteness rarely surfaces in its full, undeniable form.
The arrangement works, and working is by and large the highest praise most marriages receive from both inside and outside, not because they are true or free or particularly examined, but because the machinery runs, and runs with a consistency that has given India one of the lowest divorce rates in the world, at under one per cent.
